


a scream of light

by princegrantaire



Category: Joker (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Developing Friendships, Future Fic, Gen, Half-Siblings, Mental Health Issues, Mental Institutions
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-25
Updated: 2019-11-25
Packaged: 2021-02-25 21:47:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,787
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21562477
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/princegrantaire/pseuds/princegrantaire
Summary: Bruce, at fourteen, has traded his smart blazers for black sweaters that insist on swallowing him whole. He’s yet to lose any chubby-cheeked remnants of childhood but he looks tired, bone-deep like a good night’s sleep has been evading him for a couple of years now. Other than that, his hand shakes where he’s gripping the phone. Separated by glass, Arthur’s does too.(Arthur gets early parole, Bruce would quite like to know his maybe-brother.)
Relationships: Arthur Fleck & Bruce Wayne
Comments: 20
Kudos: 153





	a scream of light

**Author's Note:**

> \- this takes place five years after the movie! i refuse to believe arthur's any younger than forty in the movie, hence why he's joaquin's actual age here  
> \- i firmly believe penny & thomas are actually his parents and everything penny said was the truth (a closer glance at her arkham file also reveals a lobotomy so there are very vague hints of that here & there)  
> \- arthur's gay. non-negotiable  
> \- title (naturally) comes from jackson c. frank's _my name is carnival_ and also references what joaquin said about 'the light of arthur' being the driving force of the movie (a favourite concept of mine)
> 
> hope you enjoy!

Bruce, at fourteen, has traded his smart blazers for black sweaters that insist on swallowing him whole. He’s yet to lose any chubby-cheeked remnants of childhood but he looks _tired_ , bone-deep like a good night’s sleep has been evading him for a couple of years now. Other than that, his hand shakes where he’s gripping the phone. Separated by glass, Arthur’s does too.

He hasn’t had visitors in— It’s been a few weeks. Gary came by, last month. First time, maybe last. It’d been nice to see a friendly face and Arthur had laughed, _really_ laughed, and he’d tried so hard not to wonder if Gary sees anything but blood-streaked white makeup when he looks at him. The answer wouldn’t make much of a difference, he knows. Still, he’d been grateful.

Now, though, he’s just _confused_.

“You’ve got a parole hearing coming up,” Bruce says, serious beyond his years.

Arthur stares. A smile tries the corner of his mouth and a nicotine-stained hand is slapped over it instinctively.

It hasn’t gotten any easier, handling the laughter. Routine and medication help, sometimes, and mood stabilizers are certainly easier to come by in here than out there but there’s no easy cure for his condition and there might never be. He should be used to the looks by now, Arthur thinks, and he somehow never is.

“I want to testify,” Bruce adds in the ensuing silence.

“ _Why_?”

And that’s certainly more pointed than Arthur means to make it sound. His legs move restlessly, he fidgets unconsciously.

He didn’t kill Bruce’s parents but, at his worst, he thinks he might’ve liked to. The smile persists. Arthur hadn’t even heard about the murders ‘till long after they’d stopped being news, if that sort of thing that ever does.

“I think we might be brothers.”

The sentiment strikes Arthur as awfully familiar. Neither has got anything left. Arthur’s never wavered from a too-firm belief that— _most_ of what he’s done had been well-deserved but often enough, around sunset, he misses his mother and he misses dinner in bed over shared smiles with the Murray Franklin show playing on their tiny TV, the one he’d found laying out on the curb and _hey, wouldn’t that look great in the bedroom?_

Too much has changed, too much of it is his fault.

He still thinks about the truth, the picture in the drawer and the letters upon letters.

_I think we might be brothers._

Isn’t _that_ the truth?

Bruce’s voice doesn’t waver like Arthur’s had in the men’s bathroom at Wayne Hall five years ago. He’s a _child_ and that, of all things, strikes Arthur as uncommonly unfair. At Bruce’s age, he’d been— what, two years away from his first time in a psych ward? He remembers the fear. Before that, and now he knows why, Arthur’s childhood had been a sort of unnavigable blur.

School had been _hard_ , his mother trying to find employment right outta Arkham State Hospital had been harder still. Their next meal had remained a mystery for longer than he’d care to admit. Bruce has none of that. Something still aches in Arthur.

He sees the kid left alone in the alley and he can’t think of the Wayne fortune or what Bruce’s— _their_ father might’ve done. Arthur’s here. He can’t look away.

“I think so, too,” he agrees, quiet and unsmiling.

\---

Arthur’s allowed to smoke out here, tucked away in the hospital’s little courtyard, but can’t, in fact, be found in possession of a lighter or matches, which makes for a funny little conundrum. On occasion, and just that, he’s lucky enough to find a particularly charitable orderly.

Today’s not that day.

Instead, Arthur paces. He touches his face — bones and wrinkles and cold skin and the odd hint of stubble — and finds himself firmly in the here and now, not unwelcome as much as strange. This afternoon’s carried too much of the surreal, Arthur half-expects a murmured _that’s life_ in the distance.

He still thinks of Murray sometimes.

_You don’t know the first thing about me, pal._

No, he didn’t— doesn’t. He doesn’t know a thing about Murray Franklin, talk show host. Arthur still dreams of the Murray who would’ve traded it all for a son like him. A coping mechanism, his therapist calls it. He already knows _that_ , he’d said as much too. You don’t spend a lifetime in and out every hospital Gotham’s got to offer and not know the basics. It’s just one he’s grown too attached to, anchored to a heart that should’ve stopped beating so long ago.

He wants to be that Murray for Bruce.

Well, not _that_ , specifically. Something, though. Anything Bruce might need.

The realities of parole hadn’t even occurred to Arthur. Until now, he’s never considered it. Sure, he misses bits and pieces of a life he’d never quite fit into but, despite itself, Arkham is a world he _can_ navigate — a little too well, apparently. He’d never _asked_ for any of it.

\---

“People will h-ha-hate me,” Arthur laughs, shaking his head. His hearing is tomorrow. As it happens, he _can’t_ stop laughing, choking on the big, gasping half-sobs clawing up his throat. Instinct against reason, he struggles where he’s handcuffed to the table, like the one hand pressed up against his mouth isn’t enough, desperate to shut himself up any way he can.

It’s standard procedure. He doesn’t mind the handcuffs as much as he minds the laughter.

“They might,” Dr. Reeves agrees, the same brutal honesty he’s gotten from every other psychiatrist. She stands still and silent, waits for Arthur to finish. He doesn’t think he can, wonders if she’ll call the orderlies in when he really does start choking. It wouldn’t be the first time.

It does stop eventually. Arthur sits there, breathless and drained and fighting through a smile.

“It could also just be a second chance,” Dr. Reeves continues, not unkind. “I’m sure very few people know you’re Joker, Arthur. What you did—” She hesitates here, for good reason, he supposes. “I wouldn’t say it’s universally hated, no.”

But it _is_ where it matters.

He thinks of an empty apartment rotting from the inside out and how he’ll never be a clown again and stand-up dreams are so far out of reach when there’s so very little to look forward to. The world out there hates him with a passion, he’s sure, and a year or two ago the mere thought of anyone having passionate feelings about Arthur Fleck would’ve meant too much. He knows that’s not quite true anymore.

“I won’t be able to get a job.”

A high school drop-out with five murder charges, institustionalised for more than half of forty-five years. Arthur can’t tell why he’s even considering freedom.

“The city has programs for that,” Dr. Reeves assures him and they both know there’s not a hint of truth in that.

And Arthur smiles anyway, knows he won’t ever get that far.

\---

Arthur does, in fact, get exactly that far.

“Fleck?” asks a bored-looking nurse, glancing between Arthur, shaky from what might be an untimely accumulation of adrenaline, and the chart she’s flipping through. He nods, doesn’t trust himself to speak. He’d started laughing, halfway through his parole hearing, and—

And he’s _here_ , miraculously.

Here, in this cramped little office on the seventh floor, Arthur’s apparently supposed to pick up his personal effects. The fact that he can’t exactly recall having any hasn’t stopped anyone from ushering him to the elevator, still handcuffed, dizzy with something like relief. Yes, _like_ relief because he’s almost sure it’s not that. He’s glad the hearing’s over, the rest is yet to register.

“Arthur Fleck,” he finds himself saying, a moment too late. The delay isn’t uncommon, too often thoughts get lost along the way. He still hates the sound of it. _Fleck_. It’s his mother’s name all the same, and Arthur doesn’t know what else might fit. Not Wayne. Never that. Most of all, he wouldn’t like to be just another John Doe, lost in the system. There’s been enough of that going around, lifetimes of it.

If the nurse’s heard him, she gives no indication.

Release forms aren’t easy to come by in Arkham, Arthur’s sure.

All he can think of is his mother. He’d visited Penny once, younger than Bruce is now and it’s hard to understand that a time like that might’ve ever existed. Arthur has no remnants of a well-worn childhood, no place of his own where nostalgia reigns. He remembers bruises, and barely even those.

But he does remember his mother, eyes glassy and far-away. She’d kept calling him _Happy_ , as she’s always done, and Arthur had cried and cried through his laughter, had told her about the kids at school and the endless foster homes, how he hated it all, how he needed her back. Penny hadn’t come home then. She wouldn’t, for a while, and Arthur knew what people said about his mother, about him too.

Maybe that’s why Thomas Wayne’s words had cut so deep. Measures of sickening familiarity washing over him in waves.

They’d never talked about Arkham but sometimes, in the right light, Arthur could catch glimpses of _before_ — a woman he’d never met, a mother he’d never had. Whatever the hospital had done to Penny, Arthur knows it hasn’t happened to him. Maybe that’s even sweeter than parole.

It hadn’t taken long to realise the truth, easy to think of her as his mother again. He’d never stopped.

“Fleck,” the nurse repeats, boredom having taken an inevitable turn at annoyance.

“Hmm?”

The handcuffs click as they’re unlocked and Arthur nearly laughs. A piece of paper has apparently deemed him effectively harmless, a feat which years of therapy are yet to accomplish.

One by one, he’s handed his keys and wallet. The thought strikes Arthur as abruptly and utterly _hysterical_. He hadn’t even realised he’d brought anything at all with him to the Murray show that night, let alone what might be classified as essentials. It must’ve been instinct, which really does push a startled laugh out of him.

That’s where it starts and stops, caught in his throat.

Arthur stares at the bundle of red in his hands.

“Is there anything else—”

“It’s what you came in with.”

His _suit_ , first and only one he’d ever had. Arthur shakes, unable to tell why. For one night only that suit had meant more than he’d known what to do with, salvation and disaster all at once. He wants the blood to still be there. His and Murray’s. He _needs_ it to still be there, needs to cling to the remains of a reality that’s stopped being his five years on.

“You’re allowed to call someone to bring your things,” the nurse tries, a perplexing flash of sympathy.

There isn’t anyone.

It’s never seemed like a problem before.

\---

The offer of a halfway house is promptly discarded. Arthur agrees to meet a social worker twice weekly, his parole officer just as often, and pretends most of is his choice.

People like him don’t _get_ choices.

He’s been to one halfway house before, somewhere in his nearly-forgotten twenties after a particularly long stint in a hospital. He hadn’t been asked a thing then, and he’d only been a danger to _himself_ at the time. That’s the catch. Arthur can’t imagine he’d get any more freedom after five counts of murder.

Someone’s wasted a lot of money on a man not meant to ever see the light of day.

It’s all he can come up with, which makes him both sound _and_ feel like his mother — never a welcome thought. Penny had put quite a lot of faith in the invisible strings that had led her life, supposedly maneuvered by Thomas Wayne. Arthur doesn’t think a dead man who’d held no sympathy for him would’ve gone as far as to get him early parole but something _had_ happened and it’s hard to tell what exactly.

More pressing matters occur to him, mainly in the form of the little kid stealing glances every now and again, two seats ahead of where Arthur’s huddled in the back of the bus.

It’s cold, even for Gotham in late November but he’s yet to convince himself to risk putting on the waistcoat and jacket, too bright an ensemble already, too aware of the rust-red streaks on his collar. Instead, the offending articles of clothing rest in his lap, gripped tightly like his life depends on it. It might.

And yet, there’s no flicker of recognition in anyone’s eyes. Arthur doesn’t laugh, doesn’t look back at the kid either, and thinks that maybe this time he can make it.

\---

Past _Helms Pharmacy_ , where it becomes distantly apparent that he’ll never be able to show his face again in, and up the stairs, Arthur finds himself overcome by a strange sense of routine, as if the world had somehow stopped in his absence and only just resumed.

That’s not quite true, is it?

Funding for social services has somehow made a triumphant return, so have sidewalks lacking in piles of garbage. Arthur’s not surprised, exactly, if only because Arkham’s deemed it a criminal offence to keep up with outside news, lest its patients get too excited. He’s merely hoped for the best. It’s enough that he can get his medication. It _should_ be enough.

He checks the mail on instinct, doesn’t think about it for a second until he’s holding a veritable collection of unpaid bills and half-heartedly searching for a letter from—

“Hah.”

It’s _funny_. Arthur makes sure it doesn’t get any funnier than that and slaps a hand over his mouth, stifling an empty smile. He’s really back here. A halfway house’s never sounded so good.

Arthur takes the stairs, indistinctly scared of what he might find in the elevator. The not-quite-real Sophie Dumond comes to mind. He wonders, maybe selfishly, whether she’s moved out by now, hoping against hope that she has. It’s taken a while but Arthur knows now that it’s not love he’d felt for her, not as much as an ardent search for warmth. He’s learned something about himself in the hospital, about men like...him. A few stolen kisses — real kisses, nothing he’d ever had before — with a fellow patient had confirmed certain things he’d suspected for longer than he would’ve liked to.

It’d been _nice_. Oddly enough, he’d mostly thought of Gary. The man had understood Arthur hadn’t been ready to take it any further. Still — nice, he supposes, only sometimes wishing he hadn’t been quite so clumsy, so embarrassingly unaccustomed to any closeness at all.

Beyond all reason, Arthur makes it up to the fifth floor, panting hard. For the longest time, he stands unmoving in front of apartment 8J.

\---

The key turns in the lock. Somehow.

A distant door slams and Arthur ducks inside, afraid that he might be seen, questioned. He’s still got his release papers folded neatly in a pocket.

The apartment smells like mildew and cigarette smoke underneath what Arthur recognises to be his mother’s perfume. It’s a faintly comforting smell, doubtfully familiar in recent years. Dutifully bypassing the blood still climbing up the walls in the hallway, he opens a window, breathes and relishes in Gotham’s near-permanent sirens. Arkham had screams, sure, but there’s no comfort in _that_.

It’s only then that he allows himself to let go of the waistcoat and jacket, watches them tumble to the floor with a sort of absent curiosity, and understands that he’s really—

Here.

\---

In the ensuing week since his untimely release, Arthur checks in with his parole officer as instructed, sees his therapist twice more than necessary to discuss a job placement and runs out of cigarettes — plus, any means of acquiring them when he’s still in the middle of an unexpected battle to get power and heating turned back on. Welfare can only do so much. As always, cash is hard to come by.

There’s not much to do.

Not the aimlessness from the hospital but a sort of self-imposed one. Every accidental chuckle brings him one step closer to being recognised, to being sent back. Arthur doesn’t _want_ to go back.

Maybe that’s why he hesitates when the phone rings.

In a flutter of hope, his first thought is— _Gary_. Arthur stops his on-going search for cigarette butts under couch cushions and stares at the still-ringing phone. There’s no real reason for Gary to have his phone number, even less reason for him to call, that much he’s sure of. He barely knows where Gary lives nowadays, a one-time mention of renting a place near Ha-Ha’s notwithstanding. There’s a chance he’s still afraid, which is fine, Arthur is too, as much as he’d like the company.

He picks up.

And silence greets him on the other end.

“Hello?” Arthur tries after a moment passes by, grasping at his own arm where the Arkham wristband used to rest.

“Hi,” and then, “Can you pick me up from school?”

The world spins and Arthur takes a moment to pinch at his wrist, reddening skin caught between two fingers, only to find that time hasn’t gone out from under him and his medication remains as stalwart as ever. “Wrong number,” he says, instead, because that’s a _kid_ calling. He’s not sure he’s allowed to even—

“It’s Bruce. Can you pick me up from school?”

“Bruce _Wayne_?”

As if he knows any other Bruce. Then again, a minute ago Arthur might’ve said he doesn’t know Bruce Wayne either. He sort of wheezes, in the absence of allowing himself a full-blown fit of laughter — this is thin ice he’s treading on.

“Yes.” _Obviously_ goes unsaid. There’s a certain bluntness to Bruce, not altogether unpleasant. “Can you? Alfred won’t be here until three.”

That leaves four hours of complete and utter confusion.

“Wh-what?” Arthur manages, his brain having apparently given up about half a mile back.

He’s graced with an address before the line goes dead. Arthur blinks a couple of times, stares at the receiver in his hand, wiggles his fingers just to get caught in the movement. An invitation to appear on the Murray Franklin show had seemed more real than _this_. He laughs until he’s dizzy with it.

\---

Against his better judgement and a forty-minute subway ride later, Arthur finds himself in front of another pair of imposing gates. It strikes him as unnervingly familiar. He’s yet to meet Bruce without a gate or bulletproof glass stretching infinitely between them.

It’s only then that he stops to think.

Old Gotham used to be deemed immensely out of his way. In the absence of a routine dictated by work, it appears only slightly less so.

Arthur had expected a number of sleek black cars idling around. Too early, probably. He zips and unzips his jacket a couple of times, if only to occupy himself, and can’t, in all honesty, figure out why he’s come here. His therapist would advise against it, Arthur’s sure, half-recognises this as the kind of erratic decision that leads nowhere he’d like to be.

Worst of all, it feels oddly clandestine. Arthur’s not exactly _accepted_ the grand finale of his days as a party clown but— he doesn’t need any rumours. Again, it’s hard to trace what’s pushed him here, the haze of his too-early release still in the air, questions upon questions curling tight around him.

As things currently stand, he’s just about ready to give up on an already-doomed endeavour. If magic tricks had delighted Bruce at nine, Arthur finds it hard to think of any common ground at fourteen. He can’t know why Bruce’s called him here— what he’d hoped to accomplish—

“Arthur!”

The gates part and along comes Bruce. He’s faintly taller than Arthur had imagined, stylish in a turtleneck underneath his school blazer. It’s too much like that first time and quite nothing like it.

“Hi,” he breathes out, softly smiling despite himself, abruptly warm in the mid-afternoon sun.

“Do you have a car?” Bruce asks, already walking in a direction seemingly picked at random. He’s terribly serious, as he’s always been, and it’s hard to tell whether it’s the kind of thing that’s been taught or inherited.

The necessity of learning how to drive had never even occurred to Arthur.

He needs to do this _right_.

“Uh, no,” Arthur admits, wavering faintly. “There’s a train that stops close to your--”

“Let’s just walk.”

\---

Bruce talks in short bursts of sentences and is prone to interrupting any stray thoughts Arthur might have, he asks questions there’s no easy answer for, sheepish when he stops to buy a bag of chips from a corner-store and waves it away with an explanation of not having had lunch yet. _Alfred wouldn’t like it_ , he says afterwards, though Arthur’s done little but wait and smile, stealing half-hearted glances at packs of cigarettes.

“Do you think you’re gonna be on TV again?” Bruce asks, with the same polite curiosity that’s carried him through the rest of this maybe-interview. Arthur sees very little of Thomas in him, just like he sees too much of his mother in himself.

And with that, Arthur laughs, honest-to-god _laughs_.

He’s yet to get a smile out of Bruce but this— Arthur’s laughing good and hard, like it’s the funniest joke he’s ever heard. Bruce looks perplexed but not unkind and it’s easy to remember that he’s brought Arthur here on a whim.

“No, no, definitely not,” he finally manages, still smiling wide. “First and last time, I’m sure.” Then, as reality crashes back on top of him, Arthur frowns. “You— saw that?”

The weight of having never handled anything as fragile as this also joins reality.

“It was on the news,” Bruce says, with very little difficulty. Arthur recognises the beginnings of a story that’s been repeated endlessly by inflection alone and he can’t help wondering if an army of psychiatrists had descended on the poor kid after— the night in question. “I watch the news a lot,” Bruce adds, instead, over another handful of chips. “They called you crazy. Are you?”

That’s the million-dollar question.

Arthur’s many things. Supposedly unfit to stand trial, among others.

“I’m mentally ill,” is what he settles on, careful. It feels good to put it in the right words, though he expects nothing. “Bruce, did you— why am I here?”

The family must’ve had a number of high-priced lawyers. Arthur doesn’t see why they would’ve been wasted on him, doesn’t know whether a fourteen year old could’ve pulled that many strings either. The question swirls in circles around him all the same.

“I want to get to know you,” Bruce says, like it’s that simple.

Maybe it is.

**Author's Note:**

> talk to me on tumblr @ufonaut!


End file.
